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Homily for Thursday of the 4th Wk in Ordinary Time, Memorial of St. Blase, 03 Feb 2022, Mk 6, 7-13
Today’s Gospel tells us that before Jesus sent his disciples on a mission, he first “gave them authority.” Perhaps the more modern way of saying that is, HE EMPOWERED THEM. Empowered them to do what? To drive away evil spirits.
What comes to my mind is the old movie “Ghost Busters”. How can you be part of a team of ghost busters if you are afraid of ghosts yourself? In the pre-scientific world the apostles lived in, possession by ghosts or spirits, especially the malevolent type was their only explanation why people sometimes turned malevolent themselves.
The good thing about the Jewish worldview was that they took it for granted that all people were by nature good because they are created in the image of a good God. And so instead of believing that there were people who were innately evil, whenever they heard of people who committed evil deeds and became harmful to others, to the environment, and even to themselves, they took it all as a sign of enslavement by evil spirits.
They took it for granted that sometimes, people would seem well physically but were unwell spiritually and required some spiritual healing. That sometimes the kind of elements that oppressed them, and from which they needed to be liberated were spiritual elements. Their generic expression for spiritual oppression was “possession by evil or unclean spirits.”
The world has radically changed, in the meantime. Two thousand years later, so much has changed about our perception of the world, our understanding of our environment, of our physiology and psychology, about trauma and abuse and how they impact us, about the factors that affect human behavior.
And yet, in spite of all our modern education about human behavior, we continue to struggle with the same age-old issues about evil and its manifestations. We continue to be concerned about the possible factors that make good people do evil. We use other terms to describe their disposition. Instead of referring to it as “possession”, we talk about addictions, patterns of dependency, unresolved issues, negative ways of coping with trauma and abuse.
We try to understand human behavior and usually cannot pin down a simple cause-and-effect explanation that would enable us to resolve such issues, deal with addictions or address people’s predisposition to violent, or criminal, or self-destructive behavior. You see, even psychologists and psychiatrists know their limits. Nowadays, some of them are more open to collaborating with priests, gurus, imams and other religious people who are also engaged in the common aspiration to facilitate spiritual healing.
I think the instructions of Jesus to his disciples when he prepared them for mission are full of wisdom. Before he could send them on a mission to heal, to give hope, to deliver people from evil, he first made sure he “gave them authority”, meaning, he empowered them against evil.
How? By teaching them to develop some important disciplines that were essential for SPIRITUAL EMPOWERMENT—three different forms of detachment. One, detachment from material things and developing a simplicity of life. He said, “Take nothing for the journey.”
Our problem is we tend to overload our lives with too many things, including things we do not really need, because of INSECURITY. And so we tend to hoard and indulge, and become dependent on these things as if we could not live without them. St. Ignatius Loyola calls them inordinate attachments that often make us lose our sense of priorities and turn our pleasures into addictions, to such an extent that we lose our freedom, our capacity to decide for ourselves, our functionality and sense of purpose.
Two, Jesus also taught his disciples detachment from the basic human need for affirmation or recognition. He admonishes them to stay in the homes that welcome them, but also to leave when it’s time to leave. He reminds them not to get stuck. He teaches them to draw the most reassuring kind of affirmation that we can get through prayer. I recently saw the video lecture of a psychiatrist who explained how all the modern social media platforms reinforce a kind of narcissistic behavior that is always hungry for affirmations.
Three, detachment from anger and resentment, or the capacity to live with betrayal and rejection. And so he says, “Whatever place does not welcome you or listen to you, leave there and shake the dust off your feet…” Meaning, not to let it get into your system, not to allow it to poison your soul with toxicity. Perhaps we should include here the will to rise above failures and traumas.
The common denominator is DETACHMENT, which is made possible when we discover the only liberating kind of attachment—God’s redeeming LOVE, as revealed to us in Jesus Christ on the cross.
